Cloud-based content management services and platforms have impacted the way personal and corporate electronically stored information objects (e.g., files, images, videos, etc.) are stored, and have also impacted the way such personal and corporate content is shared and managed. One benefit of using such cloud-based platforms is the ability to securely share large volumes of content among trusted collaborators on a variety of user devices such as mobile phones, tablets, laptop computers, desktop computers, and/or other devices. For example, a large enterprise with thousands of users (e.g., employees) and many terabytes of content might use a cloud-based content storage platform to efficiently and securely facilitate content access to various individual users and/or collaborative groups of users. By accessing such a cloud-based content storage platform, a user can access a large volume of objects from a user device that might store merely a small portion of that volume locally. Such access can enable multiple users (e.g., collaborators) to access certain shared objects for various collaborative purposes (e.g., to perform co-development, to facilitate audience presentation and participation, etc.). Further, such access can be performed from user devices having various operating systems (e.g., Windows, Mac OS, Linux) and/or such access can be performed from within various applications running on the user devices.
Unfortunately, legacy techniques for managing remote cloud-based shared content on a local user device are deficient at least as regarding delivery of needed facilities to efficiently access the content from multiple user device platforms (e.g., operating systems, applications, etc.). Some needed approaches might implement a virtual file system on the user devices of collaborators to facilitate access to the cloud-based shared content. In such cases, the varying characteristics (e.g., syntax, semantics, data structures, error response handling, etc.) of the user device platforms might require maintenance of multiple platform-specific versions of the virtual file system, consuming significant resources (e.g., engineering, computing, storage, etc.).
In other cases, various operations invoked by certain operating systems and/or applications at the user devices can generate multiple calls and/or responses for each operation. While such multiple messages might not negatively impact the user experience when processed locally on the user device, transacting multiple messages with the cloud-based storage system through the virtual file system and network can consume large amounts of network bandwidth and, potentially, the effects of transacting multiple messages can negatively impact the user experience (e.g., slow down rendering of information in the application). Still worse, legacy approaches that implement path-based versioning in a cloud-based storage system can incur incorrect version conclusions in response to certain platform-specific operations. For example, if one collaborator renames “ObjectA” to “ObjectB”, and another collaborator renames “ObjectC” to “ObjectA”, the local platform-specific calls generated from such operations might incorrectly conclude that “ObjectA” has a new version. Worse, in some legacy scenarios, if a user saves “ObjectA” using, for example, Microsoft Word, the Word application will execute “Create A_tmp”, and then execute a “Rename ObjectA to A_tmp2”, and then “Write data to A_tmp”, and then “Rename A_tmp to ObjectA”, and lastly, “Delete A_tmp2”. These operations would destroy the version history for ObjectA, which is undesirable behavior. Such issues with legacy approaches can impact collaboration efficiency and/or effectiveness.
What is needed is a technique or techniques to improve over legacy and/or over other considered approaches. Some of the approaches described in this background section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.